A Staysniak in Jilin

Two-for-One

Anyone who looks at this blog even so much as semi-regularly is probably familiar with this landmark:

It's one of the bridges that spans one of the lengths of the Songhua River and helps connect the commercial center of the city to the more residential Jiangnan ("South of the River") district, and probably the most-used of them all. After all, this bridge is part of Jilin Dajie (Jilin Street/Road), the main street that runs straight down the entire length of the entire metropolis.

And for the longest time, I thought that was all there was to really know about this particular piece of infastructure (besides the fact that it's one of the few places that has regular traffic snarls). However, while taking another stroll along the riverbank, I found out that it actually had a rather enormous surprise in store.

Although I don't know what the age of the bridge is, but judging from my own two eyes, chances are that it may be one of the first modern bridges to span the width of the Songhua here. For as far as I can tell, it looks like the originally bridge was fairly narrow before they had to enlarge it by more or less building a twin right alongisde it and connecting the two together on top.

Otherwise, I simply cannot explain any of what I see here. When one stands beneath the whole structure, it's very clear that there's two distinct parts of it.

One side:

And the other:

Now here we go one more time; two views of the exact same bridge, and two very noticable differences.

Congratulations to you, Jilin Street bridge; for nearly two years and the scores of times that I've crossed you, you sucessfully hid a secret that was as large as yourself.

Sports Day

Last week on Thursday and Friday was the medical college's annual sports meeting, where for two and a half days faculty and students alike take part in a wide variety of track and field events.

On the first day, I actually didn't show up to the athletic festivities until later in the afternoon, when Alan was running a 200-meter dash, which the school asked him to take part in. I meanwhile wasn't requested to do so much as a jumping jack, which was actually perfectly fine with me considering the fact that rarely do people use my name and "fit", "sports", or "athletic" in the same sentence.

The day before, Alan had requested both Tim and I to come and record the event for him, and so as asked we both showed up with cameras in hand.  It was Tim's duty to use Alan's camera to record the event on video, and my assignment was to try and snap a few photos. To make sure that we were in the right place at the right time, we were informed that his specific heat was to take place at 2:10 PM. So, by 2:00 we were both dutifully waiting in place, equipment at the ready. Ten minutes later almost on the dot, we heard the gun go off and for the next half-minute or so we were recording away like a pair of madmen.

Above are the pictures that I managed to take, and if anyone is willing to take a good look, you'd see that Alan is absolutely nowhere in any of them. Unbeknowst to us, the races were running just a few minutes behind schedule, and unfortunately for us Tim and I had no idea of kowing this. Our position in the stands was on the exact opposite side of the track, and more or less as far away from the starting point as was possible. 

So, as soon as the race came to an end, we hastily began to try and squint through the glare of the harsh sunlight at our respective camera screens to see if our mission had been successfully accomplished. No sooner had the truth dawned on us when the gun went off again, and Alan's race was in full swing. Tim soon found himself of little use, for Alan's camera had actually run out of memory for another short video. Meanwhile, even though I was a bit flustered, I still managed to capture several admittedly unflattering photos of my fellow foreign Maryknoll teacher. 

(In case anyone is wondering, Alan is the one clad in the red, white and black shirt in the center).

Our success had been rather limited. However, at least I had another shot to put my amateur photography skills to use. Besides that race, Alan was also scheduled to take part in a four-person relay the very next morning at 9:40 AM.

Alas, for the second time in a row Lady Luck decided to take the day off. Once again everything wasn't going precisely to schedule, only this time all the events were running a bit early. Thus, on Friday morning I trooped through the main gate to the sports track around 9:25, just in time to hear the all too familar sharp pop of the starting gun firing off once again for a race that was supposed to start fifteen minutes later. 

As you can guess, I wasn't able to grab any shots of my friend rounding the track with relay baton in hand.

Thankfully though, despite the semi-comical mishap I had still arrived with more than enough time to spare to watch the closing ceremonies, the highlight of which was a drumming performance put on by the '10 English nursing students, half of whom were mine from last year.

Not too surprisingly, I ended up being worse than a helicopter parent at his child's school play, and just like last year I took yet another enormous amount of pictures.

If you printed all these pictures out, I'm positive that you'd probably be able to recreate the entire experience by making a crude flipbook.

And Here We Go Again

If there's one way to face classes first thing on Monday morning, it's this; become enthusaism incarnate.

At least, that's how I have learned how to handle a pack of students at 8:00 in the morning. They may be dozy as can be and will want little more than to crawl back into bed, and of course I'll often feel the same way too. However, my own drowsiness has yet to prevent me from going into my reverse Jekyll & Hyde routine. I may shuffle somewhat wearily from my apartment, but the moment I step into the classroom, I'll bundle my own sleepiness away into the closet, lock the door and throw away the key. I'll plant on a fat smile that will stretch from ear to eat,  greet them in a booming voice, and then continue on in a tone that's often saturated with an excessive amount of glee.  In short, it becomes my mission to become the polar opposite of the lethargic pupils assembled before me.

It may make me look like an over-excited abomination in my students eyes, but regardless of whether they want it or not, I will continue to serve up a fresh serving of excitement every single time without fail, especially as long as I remember to take my daily dose of T&T:

To clarify that, tea (especially, stuff so dark that it could be mistaken for a cup of coffee),

And also tunes, the peppier the better in order to get me invigorated and jazzed up enough to face the day.

But if those aren't enough to help me wake up the class a bit, then no problem. When all else fails, there's nothing like snapping them into a higher state of alertness than taking attendence. In other classes, this is done the traditional way, with the teacher reading off name after name. Needless to say, my own students are still caught off guard when I walk around the room, point to each and every one and have them call out the last two digits of their class ID number.

Did I mention that if they get three unexcused absences, they fail the course? Well they do, and are currently fast running out of ways to cover for lazy classmates.

 

Just a Stroll Away....

Right down the street, roughly a block away from the medical college is quite a project that's currently and rapidly taking shape. Finally, the local government is constructing a bridge for the southernmost edge of the city where it runs against the Songhua River, and doing so with substantial gusto.

The plan apparently is to have it built and ready for use by the end of the year, and so they're been working literally day and night to meet the deadline.

As they toil away from sunrise to sunset and well beyond, the men working on this project have made their current homes right there on the riverbank in temporary longhouses.

It's quite a feat of engineering that they're attempting to throw up in such a relatively short span of time. However, as sizable as the entire thing is, surprisingly enough it's not the scale of it that grabs my attention.

For me, it's the fact that I think that this is actually the first time that I've seen steel and other metals being used to reinforce the concrete, in spite of the fact that there are several building complexes shooting up all around my campus.

Suffice to say, I'm not quite sure what to feel about that realization.

A Stroll in the....Uh....

This Saturday, Maggie took a group of her students for an outing, and was kind enough to invite Tim and I along to join the fun. So at about one in the afternoon, we congregated at Beihua before heading out to a...well it sure was a place of sorts, and we did enjoy ourselves.

However, I'll frankly be darned if I can properly explain exactly what kind of park it was. Embarassingly enough, I can't even recall its name.

We think that it was partially a local historical park, based on the building replicas and statues everywhere. However, that's as much as we were able to make out. None of us were able to figure out whether it was supposed to be for an old town that used to stand here, or possibly a fort. Considering that Jilin City used to be famous for shipbuilding, it's quite possibly that this was somehow tied in to its semi-nautical past, but unfortunately all we could do was speculate hopelessly.

In retrospect, we really just should have taken the few minutes to ask literally any of Maggie's English students.

So to say the least, it was a most peculiar place to visit, but it made for some great photo opportunities and a few chances to enterain ourselves in a fairly childish fashion.

Tim and I believe that we should title this particular shot "The Most Hopeless Staring Contest."

If I ever had to diagnose a park with multiple personality disorder, I might have to pick this one. No sooner had we passed through the first building replica when we passed through a curious playground, with equipment that was definitely a bit less than safe.

Lord knows exactly what the odd log-walk had to do with the history of the region.

But at least we knew that this for sure absolutely no histoical value whatsoever to speak of.

For the two minutes we toyed around on it, Tim and I had arguably had far too much fun on it.

 

Again, I cannot tell you exactly what you are looking at here. I would have better luck turning stones into bread before I could explain what the purpose of this structure was. It had cannons outside though, so maybe it was a....fortification?

To say the very least, my Chinese Studies degree was of shockingly little use on that outing.

Fact: The character for "mountain" is 山, or shan.

And when Tim and I came across this 山, we felt that we of course felt the overwhelming desire to scale the mighty peak.

Here you see what's definitely a boat frame, which adds at least a little bit of weight to the theory that this park was somehow related to the city's nautical heritage.

And.....maybe this stands for the bygone era when the region was ruled by earth-dwelling archer giants.

 

Frankly, the entire place only became more and more puzzling the more we all explored. For example, here you see a little cluster of buildings and statues that we assumed was supposed to stand for the traditional way that people used to live here a few centuries ago.

However, nearby that little histoical set-up was....

I know it's a door, but why did it have to be built into the wall like that? As Tim shows, yet again we found ourselves without a single clear answer to stand on.

It was around here that the park really made quite a jump from quasi-hisotical site into full-blown minor amusement park, complete with grassy, shady areas to laze about and eat lunch and various rides and attractions whose safety was highly suspect.

I admit, I had never seen such a small "swinging boat" before in my life.

However, I confess that I only noticed the ride's size after my attention was nabbed by the cartoonish sun's unsettling facial hair.

Probably what was most eye-opening of all was the water-fun area. Mind you though, that was only because we were almost shocked by what we were looking at, such as this little number here.

Solid rock stairs with water running through and children playing atop it; if that's not a recipe for a few boo-boos, then I don't know what is.

However, that wasn't quite as bad as the various bridges that lay nearby and stretched across the pool of disturbingly brown water. While one of them was a legitimate bridge, the others were....

Well, what else is there to say? This one was literally two lengths of wet, interlocked metal chain.

Bless the hearts of those who were daring enough to play upon it, for all the other teachers and I could do was gawk at it in disbelief and ask again and again, "Why? Why?"

Event hat had to be topped off by what stood nearby - a walkway constructed of chains, and wet, round (and I presume slippery) logs.

As we watched children try and make their way across, a part of me wanted to pluck every single one of them off and take them somewhere to safety.

I dearly wish that there was a term  could meant both amusing and painfully bewildering, for that would be the absolute perfect term to describe the day's field trip.

Apologies all around to the lack of commentary on my part, but I truly believe that this is one of those experiences where words can do absolutely no justice in trying to make some sense of it all. I think in the very end, your only choice is to do like we did, and just look (though whether you want to do so with interest, bafflement or alarm is entirely up to you).

Your Chinglish for the Day

If there's one thing that I will never tire of, it's the advertisements that I see everywhere outside the new buildings that are starting to shoot up like weeds again now that the weather is warmer.

For one thing, most of the gigantic pictures plastered up tend to display a disproportionate number of Caucasians thoroughly enjoying the good life (as do many other advertisements for products, ranging from winter jackets to electronics).

But for me, the icing on the cake are the curious jumble of words that sometimes appear due to someone's attempt to make their high-rise complex or hotel sound like a nice place to either stop by for a bit or settle down permanently. Despite the fact that as a volunteer teacher I'm supposed to keep an open mind, I'd be lying if I said that I still don't derive a fair amount of enjoyment from these.

Despite my best efforts, I still for the life of me cannot figure out what the purple life is, except for the fact that most Photoshopped foreigners seem to agree that it's pretty swanky.

Watch Your Head

I was startled the other day when the apartment when an jarring clamor reverberated loudly through my abode. After a few minutes of franticaly about, I quickly came across the source of the disturbance, lying in a mess in my kitchen doorway.

I guess I'm lucky that I hadn't been in the mood for a snack at the time, or else I would have been in for quite the nasty knock on the skull. Apparently, a collection of tile pieces and cement called it quits, and detached itself for an epic tumble to the floor.

Thankfully, after giving my living-quarters a thorough lookover, it seems like that was the only doorway that was capable of doing me any serious harm with falling debris, so I should probably just count my blessing and be thankful that I wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time when part of it came tumbling down faster than the walls of Jericho.

Then again though, the very fact that one of my doorways was apparently a hard-hat only area is definitely also a point of minor concern.

Perhaps my apartment somehow understood that this has been a hectic week for me, and was simply trying to keep me awake and alert enough for the class I had later in the day. If that was indeed the case, then I applaud my abode's intentions, but not so much its mode of execution.

Rise And Shine

The signs of spring's return are abundant as can be; the birds singing in the trees, flowers blossoming everywhere one looks, and warm temperatures that make the winter chill seem like little more than a bad dream. Unfortunately me, what's also included right alongside those aforementioned gifts of the season is a constant state of mild weariness.

Photographed above is the crack of dawn, several days ago. I can't recall exactly when I groggily pulled out my camera and snapped this, but I am quite sure that it wasn't too long after 4:00 AM in the morning.

To put it bluntly, the sun makes its triumphant daily reappearance a bit early here; before the clock strikes 5:30, it's already shining high in the sky, and blazing away as merrily as could be. I think amongst the several factors in play here, the biggest one is the fact that the entire nation runs officially on Beijing Time, which no problem if you happen to be in the legitimate time zone that Beijing lies in. However, Jilin City lies just outside of it, and as a result we tend to get our first dose of sunshine earlier.

For most people, this is an absolute non-issue. Unfortunately, I happen to be a person who takes the notion of "morning person" to a bit of an extreme at times. Usually if I awake and register that there's sunlight outside, my body will immediately want to kick into gear and start the day, regardless of how much my brain pleads otherwise. As a result, my common wake-up time has shifted about an hour to around 5:00 AM. I try to stay in bed in the hopes that I'll doze off again for a while longer, but for reasons beyond me that early morning cat nap never comes.

Needless to say, as of late green tea and I have become the absolute best of friends.

Administration Oddities

Apparently, next year the medical college is going to be visited at some point next year by a team of officials and experts from the ministry of education. From what I understand, these people will give the university a roughly week-long check-up to ensure that all is being run and managed well.

I admit, my knowledge of all the ins and outs of this future visit is pretty weak, at best. After all, I won’t be living here next year, and so I haven’t been too concerned with it. If the lack of recent updates on this blog have been any clear indicator, I've been focused mainly on the usual day-to-day affairs as of late. However, several days ago it abruptly became apparent that whatever is going on next year, it’s a far bigger deal than I previously estimated.

It was Thursday evening, last week. I was heading back from my office to my apartment when I ran into Gao Jing, the vice-director of the foreign language department and my de facto superior at the university. We were engaging in the usual casual small-talk when suddenly she asked how far I was grading the final exams I gave a few weeks ago. Due to the fact that I actually only had a fraction done, I had a moderate internal flash of panic, and so after a few moments of thought I tried to reply with what I thought would be a good general answer.

“I’m working on them.” I said with a smile.

Much to my surprise, she actually sounded a little alarmed when she suddenly asked again, asking for a more specific response. I hastily dropped my poorly-fashioned façade and confessed that I only had graded a few. But before I could apologize for not getting around to finishing them sooner, Gao Jing flatly ordered me to stop all grading, period. As a result, the whole abrupt turn the conversation had taken had left me a bit puzzled, or at least until she noted my confusion and finally started to explain.

In order to make sure nothing was left overlooked, she wanted me to grade my exams in accordance with regulations that would be more acceptable for the visitors from Beijing next year. Even though I wouldn’t actually be there at the university, she still wanted all my paperwork to be in order, just in case that for some reason the specialists did some digging around and decided to pull my exams from storage and give them a look-over.

After absorbing this curious news, I then answered what seemed to be the logical follow-up question; how exactly was I to grade my tests?

She’d let me know as soon as they figured out, she answered.

So now, at least it’s now much clearer is that whatever is going on next year, it’s a far bigger deal than I originally imagined it would be. Now why precisely anyone would want to rummage through my old medical English exams and penalize the school for them is beyond me. But until that becomes clearer, I have a stack of exams sitting in my apartment, because apparently marking wrong questions with an “X” isn’t cutting it right now.

A Most Curious Reminder

I may have already discussed this in a prior entry, so if I'm only repeating myself now, then I apologize in advance.

Anyways, here in Jilin City sits a rather odd sight just outside city hall.

It is exactly what it looks like; a behemouth of a cement cube-like shape, as black as the darkest of nights that forever stands on one of its "corners".

Heaven knows what it is supposed to represent, if it stands for anything. However, at least it has meaning for one of this city's nearly two million residents. To me, it is a public oddity that possesses the 100% effective power to get me thinking about home every single time that I lay my gaze upon it, or even think about it.

Strange as those words may sound, it is nothing but the pure truth, for whenever I look at this mammoth square, my mind instantly views this:

 The "Astor Cube" that still stands right outside the Cooper Union. It may definitely be one of New York's most obsure landmarks, but it's still a landmark that lies only an hour away from my home back in Ridgefield.

And so none too surprisingly, whenever I look at the local massive I-don't-even-know-what...

....Despite the fact that it lies permanently immobile, a part of me always wants to run up to it and give it a push, out of the tiniest of hopes that it will spin just like the mammoth black cube back home.

And that there is definitely a sentence I never thought that I'd actually have to write one day.